buyolympia

Buyolympia is an independent online retailer in Portland, Oregon, selling art prints, greeting cards, books, zines, enamel pins, stickers, puzzles and gifts from more than a hundred independent artists. It started in Olympia, Washington in 1999 as a way to help friends sell handmade work online, and now distributes and publishes goods as well as running a sister gallery and shop, Land, in Portland. The header states the remit in one line: "Hand-picked independent art, cards, books, gifts & more." Built on a custom platform rather than a hosted cart, with Stripe and PayPal handling payment.

Website Design

Pastel accents over a white ground. Near-black body text is offset by a coral pink, a mid blue and a saturated yellow used for tags, sale flags and section headings. Colour appears in small doses, so the artwork in each thumbnail supplies the contrast.

Sofia Pro on a Bootstrap grid. Type is served through Adobe Typekit and runs Sofia Pro throughout, with Helvetica Neue and Arial as fallbacks. No separate display face is loaded, so heading hierarchy rests on size and weight alone.

Dense product grids. Category pages pack four to six products across at desktop width, each card carrying a cropped shot, the item name, the artist name and the price.

Shopping Experience

Three routes into the catalogue. The top bar splits browsing into Artists, Latest and Explore, and the Explore menu groups roughly forty categories under Art and Prints, Paper Goods, Books and Zines, Fun Gifts, and Wear Carry Home. Interest pages such as Kid Stuff and Gifts Under $25 sit alongside it.

Filters and sort inside the category. A Filter Results panel on a page such as Stickers offers sub-groups including Bumper Stickers, Die-Cut Shaped and Sticker Sheets, with sorting by Popular, Latest and price in either direction.

Options priced as adjustments. Variants are listed as increments rather than separate prices, so an art print shows $20.00 with an 11 by 14 option marked "Add $15.00". Each page states a dispatch window and whether the item qualifies for flat $7 domestic shipping.

A table-style cart. The cart is a plain item, quantity, price and total table with a coupon field and suggested products underneath. The footer lists Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and PayPal, with all prices in US dollars.

Brand Storytelling

The artist is the unit of the catalogue. An Artists index lists close to a hundred names in one scrolling column, and every product page closes with a short About block on the maker before showing their other work.

Small operation, said plainly. The About page stays conversational: "We're a small operation located in Portland, Oregon", with a note that email beats phoning because "we're in the warehouse packing orders."

Notable Features

Wholesale and publishing alongside retail. The footer carries a Wholesale Program and a Working With Us section for artists, so buyers, stockists and prospective suppliers are served from one navigation.

A physical counterpart. Our Retail Store links out to Land, the Portland gallery and shop, gift certificates are sold on site, and new arrivals reach shoppers through a Latest page and an RSS feed rather than a blog.